The present disclosure relates to tracking the status of a lock in an environment that that includes one or more keys in general, and to providing an indication of the status of a lock corresponding to said keys, being either locked or unlocked.
Quite often, people forget whether they have locked the door in the house, office, or other premises, or not. As a common occurrence—someone may depart a building intending to secure it by externally locking a certain door using its corresponding key, upon departure. However, following his departure, he or she may be unable to recall whether or not they have actually locked the door, securing it by turning the corresponding key into a locked position. Hence, there is a need to provide a reliable, low-cost, convenient device which may be attached to the majority of portable keys, which device shall clearly indicate whether the lock corresponding to said key has been actuated into the lock position or not.
Furthermore, there are cases when there is a need to provide the lock's status to a remote control or display unit, such as a central alarm control unit, for example when a bank or jewelry main office wants to monitor the status of the locks of all branches.
Several inventors have suggested various devices including attachments to standard keys that would hopefully indicate the most recent lock position. However, most of the present inventions describing a certain electro-mechanical attachment to a certain mechanical key do not offer a true indication of the most recent status of the corresponding lock in the case of multiple key-holders using a common lock; e.g.—one key holder may lock the door such that his attached indicator will indicate “lock” status. Subsequently, a second user may unlock the same door; however, the indicator of the first user will still indicate a “lock” status, which clearly does not reflect the true, recent status of the lock. This discrepancy is clearly due to the fact that there is no channel of communication between the devices attached to the keys of the different users. These devices also do not enable the key-holder an automatic update method to provide the status of the lock to a remote control/display unit.